From photographs of heavily-tattooed Russian criminals to prostitutes hanging about balconies and windows, ‘Gaiety’ is not a gleeful comeback in Soviet art bur rather an assumption that dark Soviet humour still pervades. It’s no wonder that the curator entitled the new Saatchi show ‘Gaiety is the most outstanding feature…

It’s the final week of Rashid Johnson’s Shelter at the South London Gallery and after reading the TimeOut 5/5 review, I was not going to miss it. Clad in my own black ensemble bag and jacket, little did I know that I’d be echoing the colour…

[caption]Left: Victim of War by Don McCullin; Right: Man in the Moon by Neil Armstrong[/caption] After almost a year of blogging, I can honestly say how much* I’ve enjoyed writing and owning this blog*. It’s my own little kingdom where I can write about anything without…

We can pretty much buy everything online these days and the reliability of online channels like Amazon and its collaborative filtering recommendation tools helps customers find exactly what they are looking for. If shopping online has indeed reached its peak of maturity, the online art market is still unfortunately flagging…

I am really not bothered on whether Damien Hirst’s latest spot paintings were created personally by him or by his trusted assistants. I’ve decided not to jump on the bandwagon and just leave *that *discussion to the art experts and the critics. It also doesn’t really matter…

From junk, blood, hair, plastic, sharks! – name it, contemporary artists have used all kinds of alternative materials to create artworks. But anything produced in glass and ceramics are still considered second-class art. The glass artist Dale Chihuly, however, has defied all that preconception. Has glass finally become an accepted medium…

Video art has never held much of an appeal to me. In part, this is because it seems to take so much time, and inevitably when you come across it in a gallery it’s always half way through, meaning you either miss some of it, watch the end before…

Wellcome Trust’s exhibit called Miracles and Charms is a respite from the Frieze-netic atmosphere of the past month and from the latest da Vinci saga of the National Gallery. I got tickets for Leonardo but will be postponing it until a time when I won’t be kicked out…

There’s something about artists that get discovered quite late in life – they are like wine, they get better with age – such as the late Louise Bourgeois who became a critically-acclaimed artist at the age of 70 and went on to change the face of modern and contemporary art. Phyllida…